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More budget cuts could be on the horizon for Mass.

Sentinel & Enterprise

Updated:
03/10/2017 06:32:03 AM EST

By Colin A. Young

State House News Service

BOSTON -- After cutting programs and services by $98 million in December, the Baker administration's budget chief on Thursday did not dismiss the possibility that Gov. Charlie Baker could make additional budget cuts in the coming months.

The state's revenue picture worsened in February, when tax collections badly missed budget benchmarks, falling $117 million or 9.1 percent below the target. State tax collections from last month were down $96 million from February 2016, when the month's haul totaled $1.273 billion.

The Baker administration in October, just four months into the budget year, lowered its estimate of expected tax collections by $175 million and receipts heading into the spring are trailing even the more pessimistic projection by $134 million.

"The last four months of the year are very, very important; we receive 40 percent of our revenue in the last four remaining months," Administration and Finance Secretary Kristen Lepore said when asked about the possibility of addition midyear cuts. "March will be a very important month to us and we don't think that this is a trend -- I don't have a crystal ball, I wish I had a crystal ball -- so we will just have to see what happens in March."

Eight months through the fiscal year, revenues of $15.855 billion are below benchmark by $134 million or nearly 1 percent. Baker in December used his so-called 9c authority to cut $98 million from the fiscal 2017 budget, cuts that legislative Democrats decried as premature.

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But on Monday, House Speaker Robert DeLeo acknowledged that the revenue picture may not be bright enough for the Legislature to undo Baker's cuts.

"Now that we're at the end of the month and the figures were not all that good, actually bad, obviously I think it makes it very difficult for us to be talking about trying to override all, or place back, all of the 9c cuts," DeLeo said. He added, "We're not completely closing the door, but I think it's very difficult."

Senate Ways and Means Chairwoman Sen. Karen Spilka, during her opening remarks at Thursday's hearing on Baker's fiscal 2018 budget proposal, addressed the possibility that further changes may be needed to this year's budget.

"Despite our revenue going down, we'll see what happens over the next few months," she said. "Hopefully we will not need to readdress that when the time comes again but if we do we will, I'm sure, rise to the occasion."

Baker this week said the $134 million shortfall between collections and the benchmark in a budget totaling $39.25 billion is "a manageable place to be" with four significant tax collection months still to come.

"I think we collect somewhere between 35 and 40 percent of our tax revenue on an annualized basis in the last four months of the fiscal year -- May, June, April and March -- and that obviously creates some of the uncertainty that we've been dealing with since the fall, but I think our view at this point is we're within a $135 million of the benchmark the budget was built on," Baker said Monday. "If we need to find solutions for that kind of an underfunding on the revenue side, we'll find them between now and the end of the year but, as I said, we still have 40 percent of the state tax take coming in in the next four months. Plus or minus $130 million in a number that's that big is a manageable place to be."

Baker in December cut funding for health care, the State Police, municipal regionalization, parks and recreation, senior care and eliminated funding for a postpartum depression pilot program, a Down Syndrome clinic and a suicide prevention account. His largest unilateral cuts came from MassHealth fee-for-service payments and the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism budget, while the smallest cut of $10,000 was for elder home care purchased services.

In total, 140 programs and accounts in the budget were reduced, including the elimination of a $2 million "Big Data and Innovation Workforce" fund, money for digital health internships, and a computer science education initiative. The governor exercised his emergency powers to trim $53 million in earmarks, $17 million from administrative accounts, $6 million from MassHealth and $21 million from other areas of the budget.

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